Map and Mod Wiki/Environment Editor (Introduction)
The environment settings are divided in basic and advance dialogues. The basic dialogue handling less parameters, divided into four tabs, and have pre-sets for all the advance skit (settings). With the basic settings you can easily change the appearance of your map, but still have a really nice environment. If you then at some point feel that you need to change some specific special cloud colour for example, you just go into Advance clouds and change the numbers you’ve got from the pre-set. Basic environment settings Templates and pre-sets When you make a new map you can choose from different Environment templates. This is just fully prepared setting of all the parameters and files in the Environment editor. Those templates can be exchanged later on in the map making process by pressing the import button in the top of the Environment Editor. In the same way you can any time save your own environment template by pressing the export button. There is another very useful feature regarding the template that you’ll find in the bottom of each environment tab, named Extract from template. With extract from template you can steal one of the four categories from a template without changing the whole environment. For example if you want the atmosphere settings from nightsky but are satisfied with all the other settings you have, you can Extract atmosphere from template and choose nightsky. What this will do is that it’ll take all the atmosphere settings from nightsky without disturbing your other settings like lighting, PostFX and Water. Another system we use is pre-sets. Unlike Templates, pre-sets can not include files and is just used for text data. For every advance dialog there are a couple of pre-sets to choose from, just to make it easier and faster to get started. Just as the template system it supposed to help you finding the environment you want without tweaking every single parameter. Lighting There are two basic lights in World in conflict, ambient and a directional light. The ambient light represents the light and colour of the atmosphere and the directional light represents the light of the sun. A tip is to use a quite dark and cold ambient light colour and balance it with and strong warm directional light colour. In the advance settings of lighting you can override the colours that is set in the basic dialogue, so if your colour change doesn’t affect the map you have to go in to the advance and hit all the “use global” buttons there. The direction and elevation of the sun mostly affects the lock of the ground and is a great tool to change appearance of the ground texture. If you enables Gouraud shading and hide Texture shading (shift-G and shift-T) you can get good feedback on how the sun direction and elevation will affect your map. Atmosphere The atmosphere is divided into some different files, pre-sets and perimeters. The sky model and precipitation is loaded as mrb-files. The sky can then be complimented with some nice clouds and a sun flare. The fog is set by a number of settings but is actually quite easy, although powerful, when you learn to use it. The colour is divided in two, two be able to have a dynamic change of the fog when it’s blended by the sun. So if you try to always have a brighter colour on the sun fog colour then the fog color, you will get the right effect. The start value is meters between camera and where the fog sets in. Then the end value is how far it is until the fog reaches highest density. This can also be affected by changing threshold and exponent of the density curve. With the threshold set to 0.1 the density will cap at 90 %, and the effect is that you still can see colour differences on mesh further away than the end value. The exponent is changing how suddenly the fog will set in between your start and end distances. PostFX PostFX is one of the most fun parts of the editor. Especially the color adjustments were you can change a map from good looking to super nice. With the brightness color tint you can change the overall colour of the map. Make it more green-blue for more cold night feeling or red and yellow for a warm summer sunset. You can also play around with the saturation and go from desaturated Private Ryan-style, to a saturated Super Mario-level. High and low level works just as a level adjustments in photo/video programs. Basically it’s used for getting a full range of the grey scale, the brightest colours should be white and the darkest colours should be fully black. To punch the postFX even more you can add a bloom filter. Different filters have different influence on the scene; it could be warm glow or a cold gloomy effect. A lot of the postFX and environment can be changed during a match of WiC. This is called mood change an it’s dependent on how much damage the players cause the environment. The more you bomb and burn mother earth, the faster will the mood will change. Water The water in WiC is just like the clouds and the sun, easily changed with pre-sets. There are two view options for the water. In default settings WicEd shows a gizmo-plane which almost looks like the water in game. But if you really want to see the final result you have to switch your view - water mesh options to final mesh instead of a gizmo, in the menu. The final mesh will be more accurate to the game, but does not update if you change the water level or the ground mesh. It will only update when you compile the map or push the “Regenerate water mesh” button in the water dialogue. So work flow wise it’s much better to use the water gizmo. Category:Map and Mod Wiki/Level editing